One Missed Call (2003)

ONE MISSED CALL
2003
Directed by Takashi Miike
Starring Kou Shibasaki, Shinici Tsutsumi, Kazue Fukiishi, Anna Nagata and Renji Ishibashi

I remember sitting in the theater sometime back in 2008 watching the American remake of One Missed Call.  It really did seem like a more innocent time back then.  I was still working my crappy fast-food job, hadn't become completely destroyed by the endless stream of explosions-over-emotion dumbass Hollywood blockbusters quite yet, and still went to just about every horror offering to hit the multiplex.  Coming out of One Missed Call, I believe my exact words were "man, that was a piece of shit."  So there's your big epic conclusion to that story. 

I didn't see the original version until 2012.  By that point, I'd already absorbed all of the big stalwarts of the J-horror genre, and quite a few of the anciliary flicks that the highly ghost-centric culture had to offer.  At the time, it really did feel like more of the same, and I'm not surprised to find out that the critical reception to this movie agreed with me, as the similarities to the many like-styled movies to hit Japanese cinemas in the previous years had grown a little stale by 2003.  It's a little surprising, considering that Takashi Miike is the director here.  For those that aren't familiar, this guy directed Audition, one of the two or three best horror movies ANYWHERE released during the last 20 years.  That movie is anything but conventional.  This flick, while definitely better than its American counterpart, is conventional to a fault.

Stripped down to the bare essentials, what we've got here is a group of college students who all find themselves under the kind of death curse that J-horror is so find of.  The twist this time is that it's strongly technology-centric.  Remember the conversation in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (a.k.a. the only time that Russell Brand has ever been remotely funny or likable) about the killer cell phone movie?  Yeah, it was inspired by this.  To be fair to the movie, it has a pretty impressive opening thirty minutes, as we get a good rendition of the Psycho-style false heroine.  Yoko (Nagata) is your Janet Leigh in this flick, as her character gets a voicemail that plays an eerie jingle before ending with the sound of screams.  As the first quarter of the movie unfolds, her friend Yumi (Shibasaki) realizes that several of the sounds on the message are being replayed through the following days until...surprise...Yoko turns up dead after a big fall, the screams that were heard on the message being replayed for us in a truly subtle "gotcha" moment.

There are a couple more character deaths done in this fashion, the most interesting of which being the fact that we're witness to a horrible reality show exorcism gone horribly wrong (/double word alert).  The story seems to kind of zigzag in about eighteen different directions, between the woman on the reality show (named Natsumi, if you're unable to live without these details) to the back story of Yumi, involving an abusive mother.  This serves as a kind of juxtaposition to what the characters gradually discover about the message, which (surprise) involves an abused child carrying forth a kind of eternal punishment, complete with the characters spitting out a red candy as they die as a repeat of the way that our star villain lived her own life.  For her part, Mimiko - the evil little girl who is directly behind all of the death and (sort of) dismemberment - is a pretty cool villain, and the twists and turns that we go through as the victim characters discover more of her background make up some of the best stuff in the movie.

The big problem with this movie is that it's all just too much.  Too many characters, too many storylines, too many flashbacks.  Compare this flick to any of the four Japanese Ju-On flicks, which are classic examples of "lean and mean" played out to perfection.  Everything served a purpose, everything that didn't was cut out.  This same theory really does go for horror movies at large, not just this one.  There's very few of them that are longer than 90-or-so minutes that don't feel like bloated messes, and that's unfortunately what we have with One Missed Call.  Scaled back even 20 minutes, we would have had a really enjoyable, creepy movie.  By the time the ambiguous ending hits, it just feels like overkill shoved onto a sandwich with about fifteen too many ingredients.

That's not to say that the movie isn't worth checking out at least once.  As aforementioned, the performance by Shibasaki as the main heroine is top notch, and the scenes where Mimiko is onscreen (ghost form or otherwise) definitely hold your attention.  Particularly that TV exorcism scene - that thing as dynamite.  Still, after Sadako, Kayako and Mitsuko, Mimiko really did feel like just more of the same, just in a much longer package.

** out of ****.  Worth a rental only, because it's far too slow-paced and deliberate for anyone else.

Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971)

1971
Directed by Mario Bava
Starring Claudine Auger, Luigi Pistilli and Laura Betti (lots of vowels in there)

Whoo boy, Twitch of the Death Nerve.  Without a doubt one of the most influential horror movies of all time, coming from a guy whose decidedly much more-restrained tone had practically become a hallmark.  Mario Bava has a good many films that qualify as classics of the genre (Black Sunday and Kill, Baby, Kill being preeminent among them), but this one...it's a classic, alright, but for entirely different reasons.

For starters, almost every slasher movie to come out during the '80s owes a debt to this flick.  Going through my own horror viewing chronology, I can't place a single film that was released before this one that featured this degree of sicko violence.  While it would be topped countless times throughout the slasher movie's reign at the top of the heap, the film raised the standard of what was acceptable for onscreen, graphic violence.  For that reason alone, this movie is worth seeing.  When it comes to story, however, what we're in for is something decidedly tedious peppered in between some pretty damn historically significant kills.  Let's get moving.

As simply put as possible, Twitch of the Death Nerve is a movie about a large group of characters competing over a large inheritance.  The amount of backbiting and murder that Bava manages to pack into the very lean 84 minutes of running time and this barebones concept is pretty damn impressive, but it's just a damn shame that so much of it is so uninteresting, but let's recap. 

Frank Ventura (Chris Avram) and his girlfriend Laura (Anna Marie Rosati) are essentially in one corner vying for a primo slice of bayside property, while Renata (Auger, a.k.a. Domino from Thunderball, and she's just as beautiful here) and her husband Albert (Pistili) are the primary opposition.  The reason that the property is open for murderous negotiation is shown in the flick's prologue, where both principal owners are killed in very different ways - both of them shown onscreen, although they aren't quite as graphic as what we'll get a bit later.  It's ALSO worth noting that Renata is the daughter of the couple and has a personal stake in the game.  Along the way, there are a whole bunch of wrinkles thrown in as Frank (a real estate agent) also has an ace in his hole in the form of the illegitimate son of the murdered Countess.  Negotiations take place, sides are chosen, and we get a whole bunch of house visits, attempted murders, and double crosses.  Kind of like a much shorter, much less boring (but still relatively boring) and much bloodier version of Pirates of the Caribbean.

If you can't tell by the previous paragraph, this is a movie that requires you to pay some pretty close attention.  The first time I watched it, I was half-distracted by my game of Hoyle Casino 2006 and lost out on half of it, meaning that I had to start watching the damn thing again after I was graced with the movie's truly "huh?" ending.  Call me an ugly American, but I'm used to the fairly simplistic slasher formula.  Group of kids/young adults goes to remote location, meet some past evil, violence ensues, final confrontation.  Now, this formula hadn't quite come to fruition at the time this movie was released, but this movie has a LOT of false finishes.  It's also got a pretty large group of dislikable characters, robbing us of the opportunity to hop on anyone's bandwagon as this game develops.

No, folks, what makes Twitch of the Death Nerve so influential and even worth watching despite its numerous faults is a rather brief section after the prologue as four perfectly happy and perfectly horny teenage kids make their way to the scenic bay for a good time, only to get offed by a (briefly) mysterious killer in ways that I'm certain hadn't been seen by ANYONE in movie theaters at the time of the 1971 release.  For about 15 minutes, this movie is absolutely electric, the tension rising to a fever pitch by the time we get the double-sex-impalement scene that would later be repeated beat-by-beat in Friday the 13th Part 2, but just like that, it's over, and the four characters that have been wiped off the screen are essentially never spoken of again.  Movie premature ejaculation penalty confirmed.

Alas, for 70 of the 84 minutes, this isn't a very fun movie.  Without a doubt it's historically significant, but ultimately it fails as a horror movie since the characters that take up the vast majority of the screen time are so uninteresting and/or dislikable.  As aforementioned, it also requires you to be a pretty active watcher, meaning that you'll be reading those subtitles pretty damn intently while you're attempting to keep your eyes awake.

** out of ****.  It's definitely worth checking out for curiosity's sake, but it's strictly a one-time watch.

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

1977
Directed by John Cardos
Starring William Shatner, Tiffany Bolling, Woody Strode and Lieux Dressler

I've always been a big mark for "nature run amok" horror movies.  So many directors past and present have tried to get cute and jokey with slasher villains, but if you make things like spiders and sharks threatening, you'll get me every single time.  Well, ALMOST every single time.  My intense dislike for the SyFy original pictures has been documented here on blog, and a large part of it is due to the over-jokification of the subject matter.  Trust me, folks, almost nothing in the real world is scarier than big creatures that can make you their lunch.  There's a reason why I rarely venture outside my own house.

When I was a kid, UPN (and I refuse to Google whatever it's called now - is it still MyTV?) used to show Kingdom of the Spiders fairly regularly, along with a bunch of other insect-centric horror films in regular Saturday afternoon blocks.  As such, I've probably seen it well over a dozen times.  I loved it as a kid, finding William Shatner's character to be coolness personified and Tiffany Bolling (his love interest) to be hotter than liquid magma.  These days, I own the DVD, and while it's not the undisputed masterpiece that I heralded it to be back in the early '90s, it's still got a lot going for it and one of the better natural horror flicks out there.

Released in 1977, the flick had a pretty damn impressive box office showing, grossing a cool $17 million off of a $1 million investment, proving yet again that horror movies rule and modern blockbusters that need to spend $250 million just to be seen as moderately cool can suck it.  Shatner plays Rack Hansen (not a typo - it's what everybody in the movie calls him), a slick veterinarian from rural Arizona who finds himself at the center of the spider apocalypse.  It all starts innocently enough, with a bunch of locals complaining about various livestock dying from mysterious ailments.  Cue the arrival of Diane Ashley (Bolling, who I remember from episodes of Night Gallery and The Sixth Sense, sexy arachnologist who pronounces the deaths to be from venomous spiders.  Like, extremely venomous.  So venomous that Eddie Brock would be damn proud. (/bad joke)

That introductory plot is well and good, but the real star of this movie are the tarantulas themselves.  Yeah, we're dealing with tarantulas in Kingdom of the Spiders, a species of spider that is not particularly poisonous.  They're just really big and scary looking.  I forget the exact number (and I'm writing this review from memory without re-watching it; that's how many times I saw it as a kid), but I believe that these spiders are said to be 20 times as venomous as the average tarantula.  So we're not just dealing with big spiders; we've got really dangerous ones.  Live ones, mind you, that find themselves covering the actors in the film in scenes where the screaming stars CAN'T be stunt doubles.  Now, I've done my fair share of complaining about actors in the past, but they earned every bit of their paycheck on this movie for this aspect alone.

It doesn't take long for this movie to effectively become spider-mania, with the damn things taking over half the flick's fictional Arizona town.  The menace seems to stem from this giant "spider hill" out in the country that serves as the insect's hive.  Every time we see this thing, there is admittedly a pretty substantial feeling of dread - I know, because it's accompanied by dreadful, dreary synthy music whenever it's seen on screen.  A few of the anciliary characters (a fairly engaging farm couple, Shatner's sister-in-law, etc.) find their way in and out of the movie, usually biting it in fairly creepy and inventive ways.  The final hour of the film is basically Tremors, with the remaining townspeople barricading themselves inside against the spider threat and trying to figure out a way to escape.  Only in this case, as was the case with a LOT of '70s horror films, we're not blessed with anything resembling a sunny ending.  And it feels totally appropriate.

Now, I'll fully admit that a lot of the acting in Kingdom of the Spiders is anything other than pedestrian.  Shatner would eventually master the whole "I'm bad and I know it" style of endearing acting, but here he was still playing it dead serious - badly - and it shows.  Bolling, while very nice to look at, isn't much of an actress either, while most of the townspeople come across as the cheesehead hicks from Giant Spider Invasion (Youtube that episode of MST3K if you haven't seen it - it's dynamite).  No, folks, story and character isn't what this flick has going for it. 

What we've got here is atmosphere, and we've got it in spades.  The dreary, grainy print that I saw countless times as a kid stuck out in my mind immediately, giving this admittedly silly movie the feeling of a documentary about spiders run amok.  That atmosphere carries this movie through some pretty suspect material, and if you've got some tolerance for hokiness, you'll find more than a few scenes that will genuinely creep you out and leave you holding your breath.  At least if you're like me, a guy who has a natural aversion to insects and an Honest-to-Christ PHOBIA of grasshoppers.  That atmosphere along with some good sustained bits of tension is enough to heartily recommend Kingdom of the Spiders for a DVD buy, particularly since you can find it dirt cheap these days.

*** out of ****.  It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it's a classic way to kill a Saturday afternoon.

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)

1992
Directed by Anthony Hickox
Starring Doug Bradley, Terry Farrell, Paula Marshall and Kevin Bernhardt

Boring trivia information for this review: Hellraiser III was the first movie in the franchise that I saw, and I would highly recommend this course of action to any series newbies.  Folks, I've heard the complaints about this movie - that it's too goofy, too much of a departure form the first two films, that Pinhead turns into Freddy-lite, etc.  Weirdly enough, it was all of those qualities that made me think this flick was really cool back in 1996.  I can't say that I would have thought the same if the original cerebral, heavily visually-representative films had been my first exposure to the series.  Or maybe I'm just dumb.

To be sure, I haven't read too many positive things about this flick.  It was supposed to be the big jump that the series took toward mainstream accessibility, and the budget was obviously a little higher than the two British films that preceded it.  Alas, it didn't take long for both critics and audiences to collectively take a big dump over the entire thing.  Going by the standard "keeping with the spirit of the series" barometer, yes, this movie is indeed the ultimate failure.  That pretty much goes without saying, given that this film features a bunch of Borg-looking cenobites unleashing madness in the L.A. streets.  If you're willing to overlook this, however, you've got a pretty fun little movie with (more importantly) some pretty likable lead characters.  Let's check it out.

While it isn't spelled out for the audience, the events of Hellraiser II (inducted into the Registry long, long ago) have left the Cenobite known as Pinhead split up into two separate entities - his human side, a World War I British Army Captain named Elliot Spencer (played in this film in a dual-role by Bradley, and he is quite simply masterful in the scenes where he is without the makeup - not to say that he isn't as Pinhead), and the pure evil side of his id.  A.K.A. Pinhead.  If you'll recall, the Cenobites were confined, along with the Lament Configuration itself, in a large stone pillar at the end of that film, and it's a few years after this that this film picks up.

The early entries in the Hellraiser series were noted for their human villains, and this one is no different.  Meet J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt), insanely douchy spoiled club owner who buys the pillar essentially because he thinks that it looks cool.  Monroe lords over a night club called the Boiler Room, host of countless grind parties and player of some pretty damn good early-'90s heavy metal music.  I've read some reviews state otherwise, but I think Bernhardt is pitch-perfect as Monroe in these early goings - banging chicks, bragging himself up, he's hatable in the best way. 

Our REAL lead character in this go-round is Joey Summerskill, played by Terry Farrell (Dax from Deep Space Nine).  Joey is a TV reporter on the trail of the story of her life after paying witness to a writhing victim on a hospital bed, chains embedded in her skin.  You know, a common occurrence in Los Angeles.  While tracking down the source of this disturbance, Joey meets Terri (Paula Marshall), a young Goth who used to date J.P. and who now has the Lament Configuration in her possession.  These two characters, by and large, are insanely likable, and both actresses do an excellent job making them more than just eye candy.  Although that certainly doesn't hurt.  Eventually, Joey even lets the orphaned Terri stay at her house.  Together, the two of them continue connecting the dots (including some video footage of Kirsty Cotton from the orignal films) and learn all about the Cenobites, Pinhead and the box's power.

Meanwhile, back at the club, it doesn't take long until the pillar being kept in J.P.'s hangout like a trophy claims its first victim in one of J.P.'s recently-fucked clubgoers, and it isn't long before Pinhead is making his presence felt, cutting long promos and ordering J.P. to bring him more victims so he can get a new body.  This plot device is a staple in the first three films of the franchise.  Lo and behold, after an argument between Joey and Terri, J.P. is able to call his ex-girlfriend down to the club where we get a SWERVE and just like that, Pinhead is walking around freely amongst the living and gives us a Kill Bill-style nightclub massacre scene that I thought was really, really cool at 13 years old.  And it's still sort of cool today.

This is where the movie really takes a detour and where, I'm guessing, a lot of the hardcore fans don't take a liking to this movie.  From that point forward, the movie essentially becomes a monster movie, with Cenobites rampaging all through Los Angeles in what amounts to an extended "Final Girl" sequence with Joey.  Albeit with several dozen passers-by and witnesses to the entire proceedings.  I actually find this stuff to be fairly entertaining, mainly due to the fact that I got to genuinely like the character by this point and was invested in what happened to her.  Amazing how that works.  Modern horror filmmakers, I'm talking to you.

One final note: this film easily contains the most on-camera time for Doug Bradley out of any other film in the franchise.  Maybe even COMBINED.  It's a move that is really appreciated, because the man is quite simply a phenomenal actor.  Here, playing two vastly different characters, it's even more apparent.  Joey's interactions with Captain Spencer are some of the highlights of the film, and as always, his portrayal of Pinhead is something to behold.  People say that less is more, but I think this is one of the rare instances of MORE is more.

In all fairness, the movie occasionally does tread into dopey territory, particularly with the fact that Cenobites now appear to be walking weapons of some sort or another in this movie as opposed to a representation of what their inner darkness entails.  But now I'm starting to sound like stuffy English major guy, and I'm most assuredly not that guy.  If you're looking for a horror movie with some good acting, likable characters and more than its fair share money murder sequences (including an unforgettable and stomach-churning sequence in a church), look no further.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  Partly due to my own nostalgia, partly due to coolness, and partly due to the fact that every movie that comes in the franchise after this is nowhere near as good.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)

1995
Directed by Bill Condon
Starring Tony Todd, Kelly Rowan, Bill Nunn, William O'Leary, Timothy Carhart and Veronica Cartwright

Trivia that no one could possibly care about - this was the first R-rated movie that I ever saw in a movie theater.  Some fateful afternoon many moons ago, I was able to persuade my brother at gunpoint to take me to [i]Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh[/i], and after what was no doubt a very long, painful session of screaming, he relented.  If you're expecting a more epic story, I'm sorry to disappoint you just like I've done many, many times before.  It SHOULD be noted, however, that the reason for my bratty fit was that I had already seen - and loved - the original film so damn much.

You'd be hard-pressed to find many horror fans out there who dislike the original Candyman directed by Bernard Rose and based on a pretty damn good Clive Barker short story.  In this guy's opinion (and this is my fucking blog, people), it's one of the three or four best horror flicks of the '90s, a perfect marriage of stylish direction, awesome acting, and more than its fair share of genuinely creepy money scenes.  And then there's Tony Todd in the title role himself.  Tragic, scary and captivating all at once, all with that ungodly deep profundo voice.  Any way you slice it, it's horror perfection, and I inducted it into the Registry once upon a time here on the blog.  Type "Lick Ness Monster Candyman" into Google if you're interested.

Lo and behold, three years later we got this - the first sequel, and one of only two, thank christ, because holy jeebus did the quality go downhill in a hurry.  Of course, my 12-year-old self just thought it was awesome seeing an R-rated movie.  I could have seen Ishtar that day and thought that it ruled.  I don't think this film is HORRIBLE, per se, but I've definitely done an about face in the years since that first viewing.  Let's get cracking.

Admittedly, I haven't seen the film in a few years, so if some of my details are wrong...I doubt anyone cares.  What I DO remember, however, is that the opening sequence involves the snobby professor (Michael Culkin in one of the all-time best pretentious douche roles, and he's just as good in this movie) giving a speech about the events of the first film before summarily getting killed.  It's a scene that really grabs our attention, and since it followed Douche Prof getting accosted by a man who appears none too fond of him, it immediately casts a little bit of ambiguity to the murder.  But yeah, we totally know who did it.

For much of the film's running time, we are privy to something of a family drama.  Our star character is Annie Tarrant (Kelly Rowan, who does a decent enough acting job, although she's certainly no Virginia Madsen), whose father was murdered several years earlier in apparent Candyman-style fashion.  The guy who accosted Douche Professor?  That would be her brother Ethan, played by William O'Leary of Tim the Tool Man's brother relative fame.  The film attempts to go through the motions that the original does with setting up an innocent character to take the fall for the crimes of the Candyman in Ethan, but the emotional punch is simply not there this time around, possibly due to the fact that we spent approximately six seconds with him before his incarceration and partially because he's played by William O'Leary.  We also meet Octavia (Veronica Cartwright), Annie's booze-addled mother who serves as both the human antagonist and protagonist at different points of the story as the guardian of this family's secrets.

In spoilerish information that should surprise nobody, we get the full background story on the Candyman in this film.  As he always does, Todd does an aces job playing the role, both in its monster form and in the tragic back story where a slave meets his untimely end due to the actions of an unruly mob, honey, and a whole lotta angry bees.  This is the movie's OTHER money sequence; it's graphic and emotional, the kind of stuff that the original movie lapped up with wreckless voracity, and it effectively launches us toward the kill-filled second-half of the movie as Annie summons the Candyman to present-day New Orleans by saying the sacred chant.  I'll leave it up to first-time viewers to discover her family's connection to the Candyman; the journey there is a little tedious, and that's the problem.

While the movie does its best to replicate the tone of the original, there's something about the execution that is nowhere near as captivating.  For starters, the actors are nowhere near as invested as the stable in the original.  At best, they're mediocre, and at worst, they're just going through the motions, with the exception of Cartwright as the matriarchal Octavia (and Todd, of course).  The characters that they portray are also nowhere near as sympathetic or captivating, and as a result, the sporadic death scenes carry nowhere near as much weight.  Remember that gut-wrenching scene in the first film where Madsen wakes up to find the single mother screaming about her missing baby?  We get nothing like that in this film.

Having said that, the background information is quite good, and there's an admittedly cool framing device involving a radio announcer that does a really good job setting a dark tone.  Put simply, there's some good stuff to be had in this movie, but you have to wade through a lot of disappointment to find it.

** out of ****.  Loses points due to comparison to the first movie; decent otherwise.